Medical instruments may be used during a medical procedure to facilitate or assist in performing a particular operation. For example, electrosurgical devices may be used to heat tissue within a patient. The electrosurgical devices operate to apply a high-frequency electric current to the tissue. The use of electrosurgical devices allows for precise tissue cutting with reduced or limited blood loss. As such, electrosurgical devices are often used during surgical operations to help prevent blood loss in hospital operating rooms or in outpatient procedures.
Electrosurgery with electrosurgical devices is performed using an electrosurgical generator (commonly referred to as power supply or waveform generator) and a hand-piece including one or several electrodes, which is sometimes referred to as an RF Knife. For example, during cutting operation, the electrodes contact the tissue and a sufficiently high power density is applied to vaporize the water content of the tissue. Additionally, different waveforms may be used for different electrosurgical procedures, such as continuous single frequency waveforms or pulsed waveforms.
Testing of electrosurgical devices may be performed to ensure that the devices meet certain performance criteria, operate within specified or required guidelines and/or comply with different healthcare regulations. Electrosurgical analyzers are known and have been used to test electrosurgical devices, such as to measure the RF waveforms generated by the electrosurgical devices. For example, at least one known testing device includes thermal converters that use the RF signal to heat an element and have an output that is relative to the increase in temperature of the element. However, these testing devices only provide a root mean square (RMS) measurement from the current transformer. As more complex waveforms are used, including pulsed waveforms, these testing devices cannot be used to test the electrosurgical devices and analyze, for example, the pulsed waveforms, because the testing devices are not fast enough to respond to the pulsed waveform.
Other testing devices are known that use an integrated circuit (IC) that converts the RF waveform to an RMS DC voltage. The RMS voltage is DC and is measured by an Analog to Digital (A/D) converter. The DC voltage is proportional to the RMS of the input waveform. However, similar to the thermal test method, this technique is fairly slow to respond to the incoming waveform and cannot read pulsed waveforms properly.
Thus, conventional testing devices cannot provide the response time required for testing some waveforms, including more complex waveforms, and pulsed waveforms, and also do not provide digitization and sampling of the incoming waveform. Thus, a need exists for a testing device that can analyze these more complex waveforms, including pulsed waveforms.